April Fools Day: Political humor is the only humor that is valid - satirist

In case you heard any suspiciously unbelievable news today, just a reminder, that the world is celebrating April fools. It is not an official holiday but is widely recognized in various countries. April Fool’s Day is believed to have originated from the Roman festival of Hilaria, that was held on March 25th, and the Medieval Feast of Fools, still celebrated on December 28th in Spanish-speaking countries. The Voice of Russia talked to Nimrod Kamer, UK based Journalist and satirist.

Why is humour important to you? What purpose do you think it serves in the society?

The thing about April Fool’s Day is it used to be very good when people didn’t know what day it is before mobile phones. You get pranked and then you say "oh, it is April Fool’s. I forgot". But then everybody has a smart phone and they know the date. The thing is that I developed an app that changes the whole calendar on your phone to make you think that today is April 3rd and then when you get pranked, this is the actual prank, when you get your calendar changed, without letting you know if you installed this app I developed. I don’t introduce it in the app store as a prank app but this is what it does.

What kind of jokes do you like, personally? What do you usually joke about in your profession? Why did you decide to be a satirist?

I did one thing when I went to Kanye West, told him I changed his Wikipedia page putting much misinformation like that he is responsible for many crimes and I asked him money to fix the damages I made. And then he said "yes, I’d love to pay you money to fix my Wikipedia".

Do you think there are a lot of jokes when it comes to serious news in the media on April 1st ?

Like jokes about Crimea. A good joke would be to give all the Crimean citizens Vladimir Putin bucks, you just spread it out in Crimea and just do more things with printer. And maybe Putin should say that the referendum was not right, and that it is a prank and that Crimea actually wants to be a part of Ukraine. That is a nice prank that Russian government can pull. Or a prank about the Malaysian plane. The thing is it is not a tragedy until you have victims. In Crimea just one soldier got killed. So, I think you can make jokes about issues like that, and also the missing airplane because people can still be alive, you never know. It might have landed. So, it is not a tragedy until there are victims.

Do you think it is harder in our present day to actually make jokes without hurting big categories of people? You can’t really joke about religion, race, politics.

Political humor is the only humor that is valid. Like in the US you have Bill Maher, he has an HBO show.

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